Reading Midterm Tea Leaves (with Josh Barro)

Welcome to Bank to differ. The Board weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right, I’m Mona Charron, Syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of the Bookings Institute in The Wall Street Journal of Lindage, job as of the Niscan Center and Damon Langer who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Josh Barrow, who hosts his own substack newsletter called Very Sirius. He’s also the host of two podcasts with a very serious podcast and serious trouble.

Welcome one and all two items before we dig into our meaty topics this week. The first is I want to thank Sonny Bunch for sitting in for me last week. He did a fabulous job, and it was really interesting to get all of your suggestions on things to watch. The second is just about fifteen minutes before we sat down to record this. Queen Elizabeth the second passed away or they announced it.

It’s a really consequential life, amazing run, So I thought if anybody has some particular reflections on the meaning of all of this or on her in particular, let me know. Linda, did you did you wanna say anything about her? Did did you have an impression?

Well, I thought she was a wonderful role model. And I thought she lived a very as she suggested consequential life, loved Queen Elizabeth, don’t so much love the monarchy. Yeah. I kinda feel that way too.

Do we have any other small r Republicans? Bill Galston would obey you?

Well, it was more than a queen that died, or should I say even more, it was a huge chunk of British history. She met and authorized fifteen prime ministers. The first one Winston Churchill was born in eighteen seventy four. The last one, Liz Truss, was born in nineteen seventy five. I don’t think she’s going to be easily replaced and it is easy to underestimate the importance of stabilizing national symbols, especially in a constitutional republic.

Yeah. That is certainly the argument for the monarchy. Did I hear somebody else weighing

in? Sure. This is Josh. I think it’s a little strange to look at this from the United States because for us, we can sort of take the royal family like reality television. And their last few seasons have not been so good from the American perspective.

But we, you know, we have the ability, we have no particular connection to this monarchy, and therefore, we can look them as as individuals and decide. I like this person. I don’t like this person and and discard whatever we find is tasteful there. I in Britain, it’s very different. I I realize what I’m saying here sounds obvious.

But I think it’s just, you know, the people people that really care about the monarchy and obvious and cared very deeply about this extremely long serving queen who served through fourteen pregnancies in addition to fifteen prime ministers. I think it will be a little bit of a challenge because Charles, King Charles, which sounds weird to say, obviously, has never been as as beloved as as his mother was. But it’s, you know, this is this is really a key part of national identity there in a in a way that I think is just hard to relate to. Living in a country that has never had a monarchy.

Yes, that is true. And we do express our condolences to all of our listeners from the UK and around the world who may be mourning her now. And I will just reflect on something that appeared on Twitter may seem a little trivial, but it really made me laugh at the time, which was when right after we had experienced one of our first crises about Donald Trump becoming president, somebody tweeted a picture of the smiling queen and said, you want to reconsider? And, yeah, Anyway, there are there are advantages to to that kind of stability. But Alright.

Let us now turn back to our own country and to president Biden’s speech that he delivered in Philadelphia, his democracy speech. So he he made a big pitch that this country is at a perilous point. These are the our own democracy. He staged it in front of constitution hall in Philadelphia. Perhaps the lighting wasn’t very well chosen, but whatever.

And a lot of the things that he said were sort of inarguable that so called Magna Republicans are rejecting the rule of law, rejecting the peaceful transfer of power abiding by the outcome of elections. But then after saying that, he went further. So I’m Damon Linker. I’m gonna start with you. Did Biden take the speech off in a wrong direction by linking his plea for democracy and democratic norms to the infrastructure bill

and the American Rescue Plan and gun legislation and other parts of his agenda? I I think so, but in in a way that is really quite predictable. I mean, this is the challenge for any president who seeks to do what we often want our presidents to do. This goes all the way back to George Washington then. The presidency is this procure institution, this branch of government, that is both obviously a political office, certain people voted for that person, other people did not vote for that person and don’t really support him or potentially hurt.

And what we end up with is a situation where they they need to sort of defend what their own partism positioning is as a political leader of a party. But then we also expect the president to sort of speak for the country as a whole, which includes members above parties. And president sort of go back and forth between these two positions And we’re sort of used to it as Americans to kind of get when a president is speaking kind of as the head of state you know, at a somber ceremony when when somebody dies or a bad event happens versus when the president has to say running for reelection. Or, you know, a good example would be during a state of the union address where it’s kind of both. Right?

The president is there. Speaking about the nation as a whole. What is the state of our nation? And speaking to it, but then, of course, the applause lines tend to be mainly queued up for members of the president’s own party. But then we know when, oh, that line was particularly good because both sides stood up and applauded for thirty seconds.

So that was more presidential somehow. So this is kind of our fate to be stuck in this way. The dilemma at the moment in country is that the Republican Party seems to have veered into and in many ways has this very dangerous position where it seems to be putting at risk kind of regime level or country level assumptions about how democracy functions, have politics functions, the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, and so forth. And Biden wants to come out and act in a very presidential way and say, this is ruled out of bounds. You ought not to do this.

But then he also wants the applause line of the Democrats, which ends up sounding like he’s conflating the two things so that Oh, so you have to support the Democratic Party and its legislative agenda and applaud its legislative triumphs and frown on the things that it hasn’t managed to get done because somehow the fate of democracy in America involves and requires that the Democratic Party have political success. That is a position that is going to antagonize everyone on the other side of the aisle. It’s gonna tend to get people’s backs up. It’s gonna lead a lot of Republicans who mean Biden well and want him to succeed in the sense of wanting American democracy to thrive, but yet don’t wanna have it be implied. That they have to kind of come on board and be in favor of Democratic positions on taxes and spending and abortion and everything else.

And so I think in that respect, Biden’s speech was sort of tripped over itself, undermined its own message, but in kind of the most predictable of American way.

Josh, if he had delivered a speech with some of these themes, the ones about the danger to democracy and the importance of not turning to violence, mob violence, and so forth. If you delivered this speech in twenty twenty one, not in the few months before the midterms. It seems to me it would have carried a lot more credibility. It wouldn’t have seemed so narrowly partisan and strikes me that it’s really a dangerous thing to link the threats to democracy with partisanship. What do you think?

I don’t think this speech mattered very

much, and I don’t think a speech like that would have mattered very much either. I mean, I’ve been very bearish all along since January sixth, and even since Donald Trump’s initial election as president, on the idea that we can have a politics that is about democracies, about institutions, People look to the government to provide specific things, to provide quality services, to protect them, keep them safe, etcetera, And so you go into an election like this, and this is an election. It’s going to be about inflation. It’s going to be about abortion. To a lesser extent, it will be about certain other issues like crime and immigration.

About substantive matters where people they they want the government to deliver for them, it’s about what the government will deliver, not about how it will deliver. And some, you can look at other countries around the world, for examples, of where you have a politics that ends up being about institutions and where you form coalitions that are really quite ideologically disparate. To address what’s perceived as a threat to the governing institutions in the country. I mean, that’s basically how the government that Israel has right now was formed, although they’re about to have another election eventually. The it was a less successful effort against Victor Orban and Hungary, where you bring those disparate sets of people together, but that’s not the politics we’re having here in the United States.

The Democrats have not been governing in a way that suggests that they are prepared to set aside a substantive policy agenda. And I don’t think that there’s a lot of tight for that among Democratic voters. And I and I think that reflects a sense that, you know, for all the talk about institutions and threats to democracy. The decision people are making when the rubber hits the road is that we really are having a normal election. And the most important thing in these elections is is what people are running on to govern and and do rather than their their broader ideals and ideas about American democracy.

You can argue about that supposition. I actually I think that is the better bet. I don’t think that there’s a plausible way to basically have a sort of to cordon off such a large section of the Republican Party. I think if you wanna keep people like Donald Trump out of power, you have to win elections against them in a normal manner by presenting an agenda that is more appealing than the Republican agenda, which and especially because Republicans have taken such unpopular positions on salient issues, including abortion and taxes. So I don’t you know, I think that for Biden to give a speech like this was ultimately always going to have to come back to those governing agenda items because that’s what Democrats are running on.

And so I think it’s fine for Republicans to point to that and say you have all this lofty rhetoric. But, you know, here are your campaign arms intervening in Republican primary elections. Trying to make the party more dysfunctional, less committed to democracy. I think that’s all that’s all fair to point out, but it’s really just a reflection of the fact This isn’t an election about democracy itself. It’s a normal election about normal issues, and that’s what Joe Biden ends up having to campaign on.

And therefore, a speech that gets positioned as profound or is very upsetting because of the presence of Marines behind them or something like that. I think it becomes really just a pretty ordinary campaign speech. The people are not going to remember a lot in six weeks.

In my opinion, he should have just given a straight campaign speech, you know, touting his accomplishments talking about why people should vote for Democrats rather than making it a so called big democracy address in primetime. But let me pursue this matter of how to appeal the voters. I mean, you know, we we have seen polling number of different polls in recent days suggesting that a significant minority of the Republican Party at least tells pollsters, like twenty five percent that they regard Trump and the Make America Great Again movement as threatening to America’s Democratic institutions and foundations. And so it does strike me that done the right way and in a and not as part of a campaign effort, that it is possible to appeal to those people in within the Republican coalition, with a pitch that says, look, you know, we we can disagree about many things, but we all have to agree that we accept the outcome of elections, for example. What do you think, Linda?

Well, I watched the speech. I thought it was

one of president Biden’s better speeches. I thought he was energized. I thought he was very present. I liked much of what he had to say. About the Magna Republicans.

Having said that though, there were some problems. I agree with you, Mona, that there was a better time to give a speech about the threats to democracy that the Magna crowd poses and to try to combine that with the campaign speech about how much he in his administration has accomplished and basically why you should support democratic candidates. I think that that was problematic. And if you’re gonna give a campaign speech, I don’t think you’d do it with the Marines in the background and in front of independents’ health. So the atmospherics, I think, were wrong.

However, I think that Josh hit on something that is important and that is that this would all ring truer coming from president Biden if he had, said to the d triple c, stop promoting the candidates who are mega Republicans. In primaries. I understand the rationale behind it. I understand that they think that they will be more easily defeated but that’s not a good enough reason. And it makes it seem hypocritical when he talks about what a a danger they are.

To democracy. So I think, you know, for all those reasons, it was a little bit muddled, and I also agree with Josh. That, you know, we in the pundit crowd obsess about these things. We focus on them. We talk about them a lot.

For the American public. I think most of them, you know, just sort of goes over their head. They don’t really care much about it. It has however, energize some on the Republican side to cry foul and to say he should not have done this, he shouldn’t have done it in independence hall. And rather than focusing on all of the appalling things that the the Trump movement has done to our democracy and and continuing to do to this very day, it sort of gets him off a hook a little bit.

So for that reason, I think, politically, it may have been kind of a wash The one thing I did think was really helpful though is that he looked like a candidate. He looked like the guy that people voted for. He just seemed so much more energized and focused than I’ve seen before. And for purposes of you know, his own ambitions in twenty twenty four. I think that was a good thing for him.

Bill Galston, David Frum, friend of

this podcast, he writes in the Atlantic that Biden actually goaded Trump with this speech, that it was kind of intentional, that he wanted Trump to overreact and that Trump promptly did giving a more than usually unhinged speech in Wilkesbury and placed himself once again at the center of attention. Of course, he is anyway because of the Mar a Lago business. But that this redounds to the benefit of Democrats in the terms? What do you make of that thesis? Well, it has

the advantage of being unfulsifiable. I

think

it may be too clever by half. Since when does Donald Trump need to be goaded into going over the top. It’s his modus operandi, and especially in these circumstances. Trump is single handedly responsible for endorsements that carried several senate candidates, the ones that Mitch McConnell refers to as raising the issue of candidate quality and more than one gubernatorial to nominate over the top So Trump is already one hundred and fifty percent invested in this campaign. And the idea that he needs to be goded into jumping into a feet first strikes me as it’s not impossible, but deeply implausible.

So I think the speech has to be evaluated along other dimensions by all press accounts. It was a speech

that

Biden very much wanted to give, had been champing it, a bit to give, had been trying to slot in for three months, and he finally gave it. I’m not a big fan of the speech. I have contributed to presidential speeches in the past from the inside. And if I’d been asked to contribute to this one. I would have said, you know, first of all, if it’s a speech and defensive democracy, let’s make sure it’s just that.

And secondly, it will be more effective if it is delivered in sorrow rather than anger. Third, It was a tactical speech in my judgment when a strategic speech was called for. As George Will would say, let me explain. We are stuck in a pattern of close elections. You know, we’re stuck in this worst of all possible situations for the Macedonian Republic, where the political parties are not only deeply divided, but also closely divided.

Which makes governing and getting things done even more difficult than the system was designed to make it. The only long term hope to get out of this mess is to move from a fifty fifty nation to a fifty five forty five nation or even a sixty forty nation and I’d like the Democrats to be the fifty five or the sixty, and they’re not going to get there unless they persuade substantial number of Republicans and Republican leading independents that they need to realign and that they will find a more comfortable home in the Democratic Party than they did in in the party that they once favored. But now to test So anything that paints with too broad a brush, which I’m afraid the speech did, risks undermining what I think is the most important political strategic objective. We

will now turn to a related subject. Topic two, are the midterm stacking up? Damon, I will start with you in the forty midterm elections that have taken place since eighteen sixty two. The president’s party has lost seats in the House of Representatives thirty six time. So thirty six out of forty, and the president’s party typically loses twenty six seats in the house and four in the senate.

This year, though there had been the expectation of a significant red wave, as we all know, that has been receding or at least subciting. There are a lot of factors. Inflation and gas prices are easing. Biden had some legislative wins. We had the jobs decision.

We have Trump back in the spotlight. And there are a number of other factors as well. But one thing that makes me nervous, Damon, is. There are many things. But how confidently can we be discussing?

How things look politically? When the polls have not been reliably picking

up Republican voters for several election cycles. Yeah. That is concerning and especially in in Senate polling in midterms, the last two cycles have been pretty dismal for accuracy. So that’s definitely worrying. I would also say though that the Republican wave looked pretty real and pretty massive.

Just a few months ago, and now it seems to be ebbing. So that would imply either that polling improved a lot or that there has been a big shift and potentially if if if they are kind of inclined to over enhance the strength of Democrats, then the wave from four to six months ago must have truly been huge. Like, if we had held the election and say, May or June, you know, maybe it would have been the biggest sweep for the Republicans in American history. I mean, who knows? There are in a way, we’re we’re kind of trying to anticipate what happens in the future, which is always a risky bet.

And the problem is if we’re gonna question the polls, we won’t know whether the polls have been corrected or they are continuing to be inaccurate until we actually have a vote to compare the polls to and we won’t have that until the day. The votes are counted. So we’re sort of stuck. I would say though that, obviously, things are trending in a very positive direction for the Democrats. If they continue to do so, then, I mean, who knows where exactly the line will be drawn?

But clearly, it’s gonna be a lot closer than it was going to be just a few months ago. Just this week on the five thirty eight aggregated poll of presidential approval, Biden hit, at least, for a moment, forty three percent. Now he’s down to, like, forty two point five. But that’s up roughly five points over just a couple of months ago. So he’s climbing a hill there.

It’s a very dramatic climb for him. All of the factors that you mentioned, Trump abortion and the Dodge decision, the decline in gas prices, are contributing to this. And if those trends continue, Biden could be up around maybe forty percent approval by election day, and that is a very different prospect than what it looked like we were facing a few months ago. So I do think probably if I were made to bet I would predict and bet that the Republicans will still end up with a net gain in both houses and the margins are so narrow in both that they probably will take both houses but the margin will be extremely tight. And so and that again is quite different than what we seem to be looking for in the past few months.

And really, who knows, with everything trending the way they are, if the Democrats can keep it up, and continue the trend going, maybe they can actually push it the other way. And that truly would be an amazing result to see an actual net pickup for the Democrats. That would be an earthquake that I think would would scare the living daylights out of the Republicans going into twenty twenty

four. Josh, you had an interesting take noting that presidential approval and the president’s approval rating correlates very strongly. With how his party does in the midterms, you posit that actually it might be a little bit different for Biden’s why don’t you explain that to our listeners?

Yeah, well, so I I wrote this based on a note that Amy Walter, who’s the editor in chief of the political report, had put out discussing a Pew Research Center poll that had as so many polls have had fairly bad approval numbers for president Biden, but the poll had something unusual, which had found that voters who said they somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance. That group of voters was pretty strongly favoring Democrats in congressional elections. There were significantly more of them said they would vote Democratic than said they would vote Republican. Even though they somewhat disapproved of how of how Biden is performing his job. And that’s not held in previous election cycles.

Normally, when you have people who weekly disapproval of the president. They vote against his party in the election. And so if you think about why that would be the case, It sort of makes sense given Joe Biden really having no cult of personality to speak of. People are not deeply, emotionally invested in his presidency positively or negatively in the way that they were with Donald Trump and Barack Obama and even George W. Bush, and it creates more emotional room for people who are loyal democrats to admit to a pollster that they’re not happy with the way Biden’s doing his job.

That doesn’t mean they’re not gonna turn out and vote for democrats in a midterm. It also doesn’t mean they won’t vote to reelect him. And so, you know, obviously, looking just at that number from the poll, I would be uncomfortable making that diagnosis. It kind of feels like coping And it also, you know, that you could worry about enthusiasm and turnout in that sort of situation. He had a voter who disapproves of how Biden’s doing his job as president.

That voters a Democrat, maybe they don’t show up at all to vote in the midterm election. But in addition to the polls, we have this series of special elections that have happened over the last few months. And especially since the dov’s decision, we’re seeing Democrats consistently outperforming Joe Biden’s performance in the presidential election across a number of different congressional districts. They’ve had special elections. Also, in in the case of the there was a closely watched special election in New York in the sort of the upper Hudson Valley area.

I’m in a district that was vacated by a Democrat, a swing district. Republicans had a very good recruit to run-in that special election, a moderate been the Republican nominee for governor who was a county executive in the district. And all the polling, all the way along, had that that Republican Mark Milunaro was going to win that election, and it would probably not even be close would be a margin of several points. And instead, he lost by three points to the Democratic nominee, Pat Ryan, who is now a congressman from there, that was not just outperforming what you would have expected based on the overall supposed environment for Democrats. It was also outperforming the specific polling in that race.

So maybe we have another widespread poll error when we look at these senate race polls that show Democrats in a very strong position in this election. I understand that we had polls that said that in twenty twenty, in twenty eighteen, in twenty fourteen, and they didn’t bear out. But I think, you know, we’re seeing in these special elections that it’s not a situation where Democrats are coming in and underperforming very ambitious public polls. They actually seem to, in in some cases, even be beating the public polling. So I don’t just assume that the poll errors are going to be the same as they were previously.

Bill

Galston, there are so many factors that you can look at that will possibly influence the outcome. This is why the economist hedging its bets, but it has predicted that the democrats will lose control of the house, but they will keep the senate. That’s their prediction. But know, just one of those unknowns was raised by Philip Bomp, I don’t know if you saw this in the Washington Post, where he was looking at voter enthusiasm, and there’s been a lot made about the fact that many women have expressed more interest in voting since the dov’s decision and there’s been a sort of rush of registration. We noted that in Kansas before their referendum on their constitution.

But Bob says that if you look at the voting group that is most enthusiastic about voting in November, it’s Republican men. Well,

that’s true. What’s also true is that the overall enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed in the past three months. Because led by but not exclusive to college educated women, In the wake of the Dow’s decision, especially, you’ve seen many more Democrats saying that they’re more enthusiastic about voting this time than they were previously. I think it is really difficult to read the tea leaves and come out with a coherent story that’s not only consistent with the evidence, but determined by the evidence because we have more variables than we have equations. So we can’t solve the problem.

But if you ask a different question, namely relative to three months ago, do we have reason to believe that Democrats are in a better place? I think the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points in that direction. That said, I haven’t yet seen evidence that the democrats will do well enough to avoid losing the house. If you just look at the outcome of redistricting, that by itself provides Republicans with just enough seats to take over. And I don’t think that anything like nineteen ninety four, which I remember all too well because I was there or twenty ten or for that matter, twenty eighteen are in the cards this time.

In part, but only in part because there are so many fewer actually competitive seats than there have been in the past about ten percent of house seats maximum. I was having a conversation with a senior journalist I’ll leave his name out of it a couple of months ago about this. And he said, you know, in the current circumstance, is twenty five is the new fifty. And what he meant by that was that a twenty five seat gain for the Republicans given how few seats there really are in play would be the equivalent of a fifty seat gain a decade or so ago. And I think he’s probably right that.

I’m laundering on, but just to put my cards on the table, all of them face up.

I’m

with The Economist. I would be amazed if Democrats held the house, but I think there’s a better than fifty percent chance at this point five thirty eight puts it at seventy percent that the democrats are going to hold the senate and maybe gain a seat or even two.

Linda, are we overlooking a factor that might be important? I mean, you see a lot of analysis that says the Republican candidates want this camp pain to be about inflation and gas prices and so forth, and that Democrats wanted to be about abortion and Trump and MAGA and so forth. But what about the crime issue and the border? How do you do you think those are still on voters minds? And do you think that is agitating enough Republicans to affect things strongly?

I do think crime is an issue I think it is something people care about, but if you

look at the polling data on it, it’s not top of the list. And I do think that people understand that crime is a local issue, that you’re dealing with local officials who have some power to do something about crime and that it is not necessarily their United States senator or even their representative. That plays a role on that. I do think that, you know, we are bifurcated as a nation. Republicans care a lot about inflation.

And independents care about inflation, but the inflation numbers are not as bad as they were. I mean, the way most people determine inflation is when they put gas in their cars or when they go to the grocery store. And while grocery prices are still quite high, gas has come down quite smartly over the last couple of months, and I think that’s going to help the democrats. The other issue, obviously, abortion, which is not a huge issue for Republican about ten percent of Republicans name it as one of the top issues that they’re gonna be looking at or as the top issue, whereas more than a third of Democrats feel the same way, and almost a third of independence feel that abortion is their major issue. And that’s all according to a new breakdown by NPR and PBS NewsHour.

But I will say that the difference on abortion in this election with all other previous elections is that it was all sort of theoretical in the past. And the pro life movement very energized, very much making this top voting issue for the segment of the, particularly the religious right within the Republican Party. But now we have of the case that the Dobbs decision has been handed down. And it’s no longer theory. It’s now about the real access to abortion that women are being denied in red states.

And so it becomes, I think, much more of an issue that women in particular are going to vote on, but men as well. And we have seen that, obviously, we saw it in Kansas but we’re gonna see it I think elsewhere. We are already seeing it in terms of the number of young women who are registering. The rates for young women, newly registered young women, have gone up dramatically since the job’s decision. And they may in fact cast their votes based on that issue.

Again, even though it’s state legislatures and state houses, state tenants that are going to determine the issue in the various states. I think there is some sense that the Republican Party now is so allied to the anti abortion movement that they’re scared by it. And they think that Republicans are going to take away a right which they had until very, very recently. If those young

voters do show up. That will be very significant because that is a cohort that tends to have very poor participation in midterms. So if there is a large influx of young voters energized by the issue of abortion, it could be significant. We will see most predictions of huge youth turnout turnout to be ephemeral, but maybe not this time. Let’s turn now to our next topic, which is learning from the COVID failures.

It’s been more than two years. And the last few weeks, we have seen a number of reports about learning loss in our schools and other measures showing that life expectancy has been cut dramatically. I mean it will bounce back, but it was a significant loss. And kind of disproportionate bill, you wrote about this this week. Our death rate was higher, and our learning loss was worse than other comparable countries, at least as far as we

can tell. Right? Absolutely. And if we don’t seize the opportunity to learn from these results, then we’re simply going to repeat them the next time around, which is why I ended the column that you referred to by calling for a bipartisan or nonpartisan national commission along nine eleven lines to do what the military calls an after action review. And figure out concrete steps we can take to make it less likely that we’ll repeat the errors of the past two years.

The figures in the two areas that you mentioned are really stunning, a life expectancy and learning achievement. And I think there is room for sober reflection and regret on the part of both political parties. Our life expectancy losses would not have been nearly as bad if we had achieved the rate of vaccination. That many countries in Europe achieved. You know, and the people who invade against vaccinations and created conspiracy theories against them have a lot to answer for.

That’s, of course, mainly on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, I think Democrats should have a serious conversation with themselves about why the public schools stayed closed so long. When they were reopening throughout the advanced industrialized world and how we can set in motion policies that will keep the schools open or at least reopen them much more quickly if we go through anything like this the next time. Around. You know, I know I’m, you know, I’m always accused of being on the one hand, on the other hand, by my tractors.

But in this case, I think the record is very clear. The political parties conspired to produce that out comes for the country and we’ve got to do better. It is true, I think, that life expectancy is likely to bounce back although the rate of hospitalizations and deaths remains much higher than public health officials are are comfortable with, we’re gonna have to work especially hard to recover the learning losses which are massive and concentrated in groups that were already behind or falling behind before the pandemic even began. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a two or three year notch of students who will be permanently below what people younger than them and older than them will achieve and be able to do when they enter the workforce. Josh,

it’s, you know, there were complicating factors. Certainly, at the very beginning of the pandemic when we didn’t know about transmission and we didn’t have any vaccines or therapeutics and so forth. You know, the extreme reaction of shutting down schools for long periods time might have made sense. But in different parts of the country, parents had different views about reopening schools. So It is a fact that black and Hispanic parents were more eager for schools to remain closed than white parents such as interesting.

Anyway, but having said that, the teachers unions did not cover themselves with glory here. The United teachers of Los Angeles head, Sicily Maynard Cruz, gave an interview last summer where she said, it’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables they learned resilience.

So what’s

your sense about the role of the teachers unions in this sad saga?

Well, I don’t think it was great, and I don’t think it’s been very good for the cause of public education even outside of a pandemic context. I mean, to imagine before the COVID pandemic that the party insisting that it’s not so important that public schools be there for children to attend them every day. Would be Democratic party politicians, unions aligned to the Democratic Party. People would say you were crazy. The key messaging points from teachers unions has been about the fundamental importance of education, public education, and children being in school.

And then that message suddenly gets blown up. And so then what does that mean the next time you have to have a fight over budgets for schools? You also see this in the greater difficulty in resisting expansions of school choice and other programs in certain states that Florida and Arizona and others have moved in that direction. I think that there has been a loss of confidence in public education and the loss of some of the key arguments about centrality of public education that used to be central for democratic politicians. And I I think it’s been a substantive mistake.

I think, you know, there’s been obvious, really substantial learning loss. To your point, I think it was inevitable that there was going to be a certain amount of closure because of public opinion. Because of things we didn’t know at the beginning of the pandemic, but the costs that have been enormous. But there’s also been this sort of shaking of the centrality of public education, public schools as an institution in our society. And I think that it’s been weakened in part because teachers unions and other institutions did not argue forcefully enough for the importance of school in a in a way that I find to have been really strange.

I mean, for a a teachers union leader to say basically, it’s not important. Whether kids are in the classroom learning things from teachers. How does that represent the interests of people in your union? When you need to go out there and argue that you need to hire more of them and they should be paid more and that they should have other various improvements their conditions of their employment if you’re basically saying that their work is not very important that undermines your whole project. So I found that very strange.

I want to know one other thing about, you know, lessons that we’ve learned or that we haven’t learned, because we had another epidemic this year, still ongoing, although it’s abating, which is this monkeypox epidemic.

Which in

so many ways is much easier for the government to respond to than COVID was. It’s monkeypox has significantly more difficult transmission that’s affected a relatively small community from spreading mostly among men who have sex with men. And so the number of people that you needed to vac was not that large, and we already had a vaccine that was invented and purchased by the federal government. And still, the rollout was such a mess in so many ways including that we’d bottle this vaccine and it was stuck over in Denmark and there were essentially paperwork issues, making it difficult to get the vaccine out of Denmark the FDA had not had occasion to send their inspector over to look at the Danish facility and so wouldn’t approve it for use in the US even though the relevant European regulator had already approved it. The vaccine was being distributed in Europe.

And then you’ve also had messaging that has been very confusing to the public about exactly who should be concerned about monkey pox and what the risks are. And I raised this because, you know, the reason that we stockpile that vaccine is not principally about monkeypox. It’s the same vaccine that’s used for smallpox. And so we’re supposed to be prepared for the risk that there could be a bioterror attack or an accident that caused smallpox to get out into the population, smallpox, both easier to spread and much deadlier than monkeypox or that we can have some other orthopox virus outbreak that again unlike monkeypox might be easier to spread and more deadly and a much larger problem than this epidemic ended up being. And so I think what we saw from that is that the government wasn’t ready even for this relatively easy task.

Of containing the monkeypox epidemic. So we’re absolutely screwed if there’s a smallpox epidemic. I think, you know, we’ve not made the financial investments that we needed to make in pandemic preparedness, and we haven’t made the cultural change at organizations like the CDC. Which again got caught on the back foot, didn’t know how to properly talk to the public and allowed themselves to be caught up in these really bizarre bureaucratic morasses. That slowed the distribution of vaccines in a way that could be a lot costlier in a future pandemic.

And so that scares me quite a bit. And it need hardly

be said that smallpox is also far more deadly than COVID-nineteen was and more contagious. So Damon, so something that Josh raises is about the credibility of public health authorities. And I think we’ve discussed this once before or alluded to it on the podcast that this is something we really need to revisit. We need to rethink. There has to be some real reform here.

And, you know, just one small example, but It was significant, which is the public health experts who sacrificed their own credibility by saying that don’t wear masks, masks won’t protect you early on. And we later learned that they only said that because they were worried they weren’t going to have enough masks for medical professionals and not because it didn’t protect you. And they later changed the guidance, of course. And that does terrible damage to public confidence in what public health authorities say. And then, of course, they were all of the about faces on the George Floyd protests where they said, well, if you’re if you’re protesting for something that we approve of, then yeah, it’s okay to gather in large groups.

Right.

And you still see this kind of bizarre arbitrary double standards going on, like in New York City, for instance, the Pop singer Harry Styles has had a series of sold out shows of Madison Square Garden for the last several weeks, and this is twenty thousand people packed into a large room and singing and dancing. COVID is waning so and people are vaccinated very widely and so forth. So I’m not up in arms about this being a public health threat. But clearly, if we were, as the society, still deeply concerned about COVID, this would be a terrible event where you would expect a major spreader event to come out of it with lots of new infections. But that’s going on in New York City.

And at the same time, the New York City public schools reopened this week and they’re still they’ve they’ve loosened a lot of the restrictions, but not all of them, a lot of parents bringing young kids to school are restricted from bringing their kids into the classroom because they don’t want parents coming in because they’re afraid of spreading. The virus, but yet those very teachers could have been at the Harry’s Style’s concert than I before. It just it ends up looking like we don’t really know what we’re doing, and it’s feeds into these two cultural tendencies that really, I think, have been highlighted by this whole experience the pandemic. On the one hand, trust in public institutions kind of growing out of age old American dispositional liver Carrying as I’m a kind of suspicion of government authority and experts a belief that no one’s going to tell me how to live my life. That is kind of free floating.

And the country and has led to vaccine resistance. It was weaponized by Republicans and especially Donald Trump for their own political advancement, which contributed I think in a very significant way to our higher than expected fatality rates for the virus compared to other countries as well as the declining life expectancy numbers that we were talking about. But then on the other hand, you also have a kind of really intense risk aversion in certain other segments of the country and culture, especially among Liberals, progressives, blue states, and so forth. And that’s how you end up with, I think, a lot of resistance schools opening among teachers unions. The teachers were like, this is like sending me in to, you know, do, like, life threatening work and I I’m not gonna go for it.

That’s why we have a union to keep me safe. And I’m sort of not wanting to have to go back into the classroom until the virus was completely eradicated, which very quickly became clear was never gonna happen. And then, of course, the fact that the Blues state areas and the schools are doing that then becomes fodder for the distrust in institutions among the other Americans and the other Americans not want to get vaccinated feeds the fear of the blue state risk aversion. And this this kind of feedback loop of those streams, I fear I is going to get replayed the next time we end up facing a pandemic. And I don’t really have a suggestion of how to get out or other than our institutions have to try to be more preemptively aware that this is the environment in which they opt great and do a better job of not giving either side too much ammunition to advance their neurosees.

Linda,

I bowed to no one in my in how much I despise the messaging from the MAGA Republicans about heaping scorn on wearing masks and spreading disinformation about vaccines and so forth. That was really grotesque. But at the same time, I have to say, I am really frustrated by the behavior of the teachers unions. We had bars and restaurants opening and schools were still closed in a number of states in this country. And unsurprisingly, because, you know, people at the lower end of the economic ladder children have less access to computers, less nice quiet time, less parental time for them to, you know, get tutoring and so forth.

They suffered the most. And, you know, it’s just infuriating. Those kids will never make up the loss. As

you know, Mona, I worked for Al Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers — I do. — for many, many years and was a great personal admirer of him. He played a very important role, not just in the nation, but he played very important role in my own career. But having said that, Hal Shanker was very clear on who he represented. He represented teachers.

And, you know, there is an apocalypses quote that is sometimes attributed to him that I don’t think he actually said, which is when children start paying union dues all represent their interests. I don’t think he ever said that, but he didn’t know that his interests were to represent his workers. And so it doesn’t surprise me that Randy Weingarten and whoever’s the head of the NDA now were not out there representing what was in the best interest of children. They were representing their member’s interests. And their members did not want to be put in front of classrooms and exposed to possibly getting COVID themselves, which is I THINK THE PRIMARY REASON THAT SCHOOL SHUT DOWN, I DON’T THINK IT HAD TO DO WITH THE INTEREST OF PREVENTING CHILDREN FROM GETTING sick.

I think it was much more focused on the workers who had to go the adults because children even though some children did in fact get COVID and die. COVID, for the most part, was a disease that killed adults.

I

think the whole US response to COVID has been abysmal. I think it really is a black mark against our competence. Our government’s competence. And I just did the numbers on how many people are dying of COVID right now. I mean, it’s about four hundred every day.

And as of a week or two ago, it was about five hundred a day with the, you know, latest surge among the variant of Almirall that has affected Americans. That’s sort of astounding, and we don’t even think about it much today. I mean, the New York Times still puts those statistics on its front page and at least its online version. But I think we have stopped thinking of COVID as the threat that it is. And we did bundle it.

And the way we bundled it the most, I think, has less to do with government than it does with the American people. And here, going back for early discussion of backup Republicans, this terrible backlash against vaccines that I think was promoted by people on the right had a devastating consequence. And interestingly, you know, they’re also the people are more likely to die. It is more elderly, more lower income people, the kind of people that voted for Donald Trump. That are more likely to have died of COVID.

Who rejected getting vaccinated? Who rejected getting vaccines? Right? I mean, the fact that we have such a low rate of vaccines and particularly people who’ve gotten boosters, I think it’s only about thirty percent or something of people who gotten their boosters in the United States that that’s just appalling. And you know, it does say something about American culture as much as it does about government and government’s competence.

We can you know, faults, doctor Fauci and others for not having told us to run out and get masks. I ignored that advice and went out and got masks. At the very first mention of the first case of COVID. Sometimes you do have to, you know, use a little common sense. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

My thought was, and it might help. But it really is American culture and are what’s happened to us. And it’s not just the COVID vaccines. People are not vaccinating their children against other common diseases. People aren’t getting vaccines themselves.

I agree very much with Bill. I thought his particle was excellent. And I think a kind of Kurner Commission report on what happened in the United States? Why did this happen to us? And what can we do to try to change

it? Is something I would certainly support? Okay. Thank you for that. And now we will turn to our final segment, which is highlights and lowlights of the week and or

I should say. Okay. We’ll start with you, Bill Galston. Well, I was scratching my head until I read Dana Millbanks column of the Washington Post. Millbank who sometimes goes over the top in my view was right on, he summarized and quoted from an interview that J.

D. Vance the Republican candidate for senate in Ohio gave to a right wing podcaster in which he said We’re in a late Republican period that said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. If we’re gonna push back against it, we’re gonna have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there and going directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. Well, that peaked my curiosity. What did mister Vance mean by going wild?

And he proceeded to explain. He said he’d been radicalized by the actions of malevolent and evil politicians. He said he wants to seize the institutions of the left and purge political opponents with, quote, denoxification and debatification. So he wants to fire all the civil servants no matter, you know, what Civil various civil service laws have to say about the matter. And then he said, we have to do what Victor Arban has done.

Basically take over the curricula of the schools and make sure there’s nothing seditious or against the canons of the western tradition as mister Orbach understands them, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This from a very intelligent man who wrote a very perceptive book about the milieu from which he came. I am almost speechless, which is why all I could do was to quote from the column. What does it mean that politicians and mister Vance’s intelligence

are

saying in effect, we need to use para constitutional and extra legal means. To save ourselves. Yeah. This is this is what judge Luttig was talking about when he said that

the Republican Party does represent a threat to our constitutional order. There are quite a few of them who are endorsing authoritarianism just full on. Thank you for that, Bill, Linda Chavez. Well, I think this is an

article that you’ll have some interest in Mona. It is along opinion piece by Nicole Hammer, and it is entitled the man who won the Republican Party before Trump did. And there’s a big, big picture of your old colleague and mine in the Reagan White House, one pet, Buchanan. Mhmm. It was a fascinating piece.

I think those of us who knew Pat, who share yours and my politics today, have very mixed feelings about him. I thought he was funny and gracious and someone I enjoyed working with, but his politics had a very, very dark side. And miss Hammer talks about Pat and his run for president in nineteen ninety too and what a harbinger that was of Donald Trump. She talks about a visit he made down to the border where he talked about building a Buchanan fence. I had forgotten about that.

It’s a fascinating piece. It talks about Buchanan’s role in populism and the way in which the right really rejected Reaganism and that Pat was Harbinger of that, and that he was the man who very much prefigured Donald Trump. So I recommend the piece. I thought it was well written and interesting and certainly had some personal resonance for me.

Yeah. Thank

you. Nicole Hammers very good. I I look forward to reading it. I would just say, Linda, just for your a delectation. It is amazing, isn’t it?

That at this moment, when Buchananism has triumph through Trumpism, that not only Buchanan is on Trump’s side, but so are William Bennett and Norman cohorts. Oh, yeah. That makes that that actually flattens

me. Much more and not so much better — Yeah. — whom I have have mixed feelings about for many, many years. But Norman Putnam’s you know, he was just such a shining light in my own intellectual development that it makes me very sad.

Yeah. Me

too. Okay. Damon Linker, Yeah. Let me just also plug on Nikki Hammer who that that piece on Buchanan comes from her new book called partisans. Which is just out and is fabulous.

Definitely recommended to to everyone who listens to the podcast. Although that was not my choice, Phil and Linda did not steal my thunder today for my highlight. My highlight is actually an episode of a podcast by I Rabbi and writer named Zohar Atkins. He does a podcast titled Meditations with Zohar. Very philosophical, religious, thoughtful discussions there, and he has his latest episode is an interview with my former teacher and friend, Mark Lila, who’s definitely one of the big influences on me and my thinking.

And I’ll just briefly read from the description of the episode because it’s so nice that contains all of the subjects they work through in their hours. So talking, they talk about great books, the purpose of humanity’s education, falling in love with ideas, conversion and deconversion, ignorance and bliss. Theology of accommodation and the instructive all to human example of thinkers who air in the sense of make mistakes. So if you’re interested in a free flowing stimulating and really thoughtful philosophical conversation, I recommend that episode of of the podcast, meditations with Zohar, with guests Mark Lillow. Great.

Thank

you. Josh

Barrow. My Lillow Light this week is I look around and it seems to me like a lot of people have been looking at Joe Biden’s improving political fortunes and have been pushing out a draft of their but Joe Biden should set aside column before it’s too late, before it’s going to become completely implausible to publish that column. You had Ross Barkin, New York Magazine this week. Actually, the Bulwark published one of these this week. The idea that Joe Biden should step aside and create a messy free for all primary for Democratic Party to seek to replace him.

It’s just absolutely crazy, both as a substantive governing matter and as a political matter. I mean, you can look at what the twenty twenty primary was like to imagine what a twenty twenty four primary would be like. It would be found car with a zillion candidates each trying to get as far to the left as possible to make the right set of promises to try to win over activists in the party to its detriment in a general election. And it’s likely that you would end up with Kamala Harris as the nominee, even if there was a wide open nominating contest. And she is less popular than president Biden.

If people are arguing that Biden should step aside, they should think for themselves about whether the things they’re saying about why Joe Biden can’t run a good twenty twenty four campaign are things that they were saying incorrectly during the twenty twenty campaign. People say he’s too old for this. He is his communication is not clear enough. He’s out of touch. Young people don’t like him enough.

These are exactly the things that people were saying throughout twenty nineteen and into early twenty twenty, watching him lead the polls the whole way through, and saying, ah, it’s just name recognition. There’s no way that can last. He’s not good enough. He’s not going to be able to win this thing. And he did.

He won the primary. He won the general election. And he has chalked up quite as successful legislative record. And as gas prices have steadily fallen, he’s even not so dismally unpopular as he once was. So Democrats there’s a reason incumbent secret reelection.

Democrats have a horse to bet on here. He’s in the race already. The idea that you would want him voluntarily step aside and that that would somehow be good for the party is just absolutely crazy and I can’t believe that I keep seeing people write this publications. Alright. You

and Jonathan V last are on the same page. Alright. I would like to highlight a piece that appeared in persuasion, which you can read at persuasion dot community. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s very well worth the subscription. You may

have heard

that the voters of Chile rejected a proposed new constitution this week and it was really a very, very important vote. The Chile dodged a bullet. This constitution would have been trying More than a hundred rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any constitution in the world, more than any policy can possibly fulfill, many of the rights contradicted one another, so attempting to enforce them would have been an unholy mess. And they were absurd. Oh, sorry, I forgot to say who this is by.

It’s by Francisco Toro. It’s called how not to write a constitution. And okay. So that that’s the author. And he is I’ll get to get to him in a second.

But here are some of the examples why it would have been so crazy. Like, the right to housing. Universal and timely enjoyment of this right contemplating at a minimum. The habitability, space and sufficient equipment, both domestic and communal. For the production and reproduction of life, the availability of services affordability, accessibility, appropriate location, security of tenure, and cultural relevance of housing in accordance with the law.

And on and on and promised health and holistic well-being, including all of its physical and mental aspects, Anyway, there were it went on and on like this. And what this writer says is he’s originally from Venezuela, and he said Venezuela went through a very similar process when they drafted a new constitution in nineteen ninety nine. And the document he writes, the document that resulted was beautiful. A genuinely stirring description of an earthly utopia. And he he says, but blind to trade offs and resource limitations, the text soon proved utterly unworkable as a way of organizing what the state must and must not do.

Which is why judges soon learn to ignore it and rule the way their political masters wanted them to rule instead A few years later, when those same masters turned dictatorial, our Turing gasets, he describes it, compares it to a kind of art. Constitution offered no resistance at all. It was already a dead letter. So Congratulations to Francis Cottoro for a great peace in persuasion. How not to write a constitution, and congratulations to the people of Chile.

I hope they can come up with a much more reasonable substitute and vote on that. I want to thank Josh Barrow for joining us. He also set in for me once when I was on vacation, did fabulous job, thank our producer, King Cooper, our sound engineer, Joe Armstrong, and course, our faithful listeners. We will return next week as every week.

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